Brain gyms can work – if they train one skill at a time

Brain training might keep you mentally young after all, but only if you exercise one skill at a time.

Older people who hone their multitasking skills in a 3D video game can improve their performance in cognitive tasks. Players continue to show improvements six months later, suggesting that the right kind of games might help stave off cognitive decline.

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The volunteers in that study trained using games that targeted several skills at the same time. Joaquin Anguera of the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) wondered whether this could explain their limited benefits. “It’s like doing bicep curls and then going to run a marathon – it doesn’t work that way,” Anguera says.

Anguera and Adam Gazzaley, also at UCSF, and their colleagues reasoned that training just one ability at a time might tease apart the benefits of these games. To test this, they created NeuroRacer – a video game that trains players’ multitasking skills by having them drive a car with a joystick, while reacting to the signs that appear on a screen.

Lasting benefits

Anguera, Gazzaley and their colleagues asked 16 people aged between 60 and 85 to play the video game three times a week for four weeks. At the same time, the team gave a separate, age-matched group of 15 people a simpler version of the game that only involved driving, without the signs.

A month later, the group that played the multitasking game was significantly better not only at the game itself, which you would expect, but also in tests that gauged the ability to concentrate and juggle several tasks at once. The people that played the simpler game showed no improvement.

The results also seem to last. The players were still showing improvements in cognitive tests six months later.

Adam Hampshire of Imperial College London, who co-authored the study comparing brain training games to surfing the net, says he is still “planted quite firmly on the fence”. The experiment needs to be repeated with more people in order to show strong evidence for the game’s usefulness, he says. “But I could be persuaded,” he adds.